It had been about ten minutes since he had followed the Defenders and Jaevis through the knocked-open doors, and he had become irrevocably lost. The galleries seemed to run in circles, the stairways never seemed to bring him where he thought they would, and the corridors all looked precisely the same. The halls seemed to change when he looked away, too. If Tyvian hadn’t warned him that the place was awash in illusion, he would have thought he was losing his mind. It had been some time since he’d seen anybody. Artus pulled out the seekwand to check if he was going the right direction. The swirling pool of shadow that enveloped the wand’s tip jerked and flickered, which Artus thought was a good sign, but he wasn’t sure. For the tenth time that day, he wished he had paid closer attention when Tyvian was telling him how it worked. An alarm bell sound somewhere deeper within the palace (or farther out, depending on whether Artus was deep inside the place or not, of which he couldn’t be sure).
